Project 29
September 17th to October 8th 2010
‘Surface’ is the inaugural launch of a new organisation and an exhibition to examine the effect of site-specific study transported into a gallery space. Project29 was formed to re-address all questions about why artists need to communicate ideas and how study is delivered and appropriated to an audience.
Private view Friday 17th September 7-9pm
Artists Talk: 6th October 7pm
‘Surface’ is the inaugural launch of a new organisation and an exhibition to examine the effect of site-specific study transported into a gallery space. Project29 was formed to re-address all questions about why artists need to communicate ideas and how study is delivered and appropriated to an audience. It takes particular strength from placing artists back into the reality of actual place in order to gain the information necessary to generate conceptual ideas and practical work.Project29’s aim is to mark its place in the development of arts creation and to carve a niche within which its objectives and aspirations can build. The very nature of this operation has led to the layering of process, conversation, time and the perception of work through various forms of investigation.
The exhibition examines site specificity not exclusively as a genre but as a problem-idea, as a peculiar inquiry of art & spatial politics that theorises the re-configurations of location. Combining art & site with the possibilities of intimacy through absence, distance and ruptures of time and place - here the focus is a site that travels between two points of reference. It is a part of the River Trent that wends its way between Gunthorpe and Trent Bridge and the journey from there to a gallery space. The work intends to engage with site orientated study and the process at which ideas, objects and materials are gathered from one into the other, theorising the transformation point between the subject/object and location through post modern conditions.
Through collage and dimensional research, the phenomenological and experimental understanding of site engages with architecture and its boundaries of engineering; through sculpture and the photographic, found objects and coordinated locations are defined through their properties of situation according to an ‘object’ or ‘event’ and the position it occupies; through painting and abstraction of image notation there is an interpretation of water, its controlling factors and its discourse. All are exchanges between the work of art and the places in which its meanings are defined and where the gallery context is seen as a destination point where the works are completed and presented.
The artists and the work produces collective memory of the site, an engaged process that questions what is happening, what has happened in location to the river Trent. Working in this way implies questioning, possibly rejecting, the irony and relativism of certain strains of enquiry in contemporary art and positioning art production as an ‘engaged’ process. What has been brought forward to this exhibition is a dynamic set of objects whose interplay and cross reference helps to explain to the spectator clear aims, objectives and interest of what this new initiative, Project29, is about.
Project29 is a new Non Profit Contemporary Arts Organisation based in the East Midlands that works with professional art networks and individuals. Founded by its members in 2009 it develops projects of contemporary art that are dedicated to experimentation and an original approach to arts theory and practice.